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Study: My Understanding of Websites

A Guide About The Google Penguin Update

One of Google’s most talked about algorithmic changes since the Panda update in February 2011 rolled out on the 24th April. Because it impacted so many websites, causing many to lose rankings and in the process, most of their web traffic, it has been talked about so much.

Needless to say, this can be catastrophic, to say the least, for most businesses that rely heavily on traffic referrals from Google. But what was the “Penguin update” and why did the “Penguin update” affect so many websites?

It is Google’s job as the leading search engine to make sure that the results that it produces are relevant and of a high quality when we use Google in some way or another to find information. That way, maintaining faith in Google and continuing to use the service are the users. Targetting webmasters that were over optimising their websites, building spammy back links and generally abusing the Google guidelines in order to rank better within the organic search results is the latest update. Penalised by the algorithmic filter and demoted in the search results are the sites that over the years had been gaming the system somewhat which is the reason that Penguin was implemented. Around 3.1% of search queries was said to be affected by the update which does not sound like a lot, but considering that Google receives hundreds of millions of search queries every day, this equates to millions of websites being penalised.

The Penguin update is not a manual penalty which is worth noting, where a human has followed say a spam report and taken action. Based on certain criteria which assesses whether or not a site has been over optimised or been building spammy back links, the Penguin update is an algorithmic update which filters out sites.

It is pretty likely that you were hit by it if you lost pretty much all of your websites traffic from Google just after the 24th April. Appearing to retain their page rank and continuing to be crawled and indexed are the sites, which is one thing that is noticeable. If you obtained many low quality links or paid links, devalued are these sites meaning that the links that were pointing to your site previously have also been devalued. A penalty is what this can appear to be but in fact is purely a natural drop in rankings due to a devaluation of those incoming links.

The future of marketing of your site, for us, is clear. A different approach to your online marketing is what you will need to start adopting if you have been affected by the Penguin update.